“Recently Gnome have been noticing they’re not winning either. There is a growing realisation that Canonical dropped Gnome some years ago. [This is melodramatic overstatement, there are still a bunch of Gnome programmes used in Ubuntu Desktop but the workspace and web browser and e-mail client aren’t. Canonical is also using more Qt and less GTK.] Articles like GNOME 3: Why It Failed don’t really help the impression[…]All this just highlights that we’ve been making free software for users for over 15 years and still not got out of the geek market.”

This is really the crux of the matter right here. For many, many years, Linux developers of various projects from all over the world have been developing apps and interfaces for other geeks.

And, unless things change, it will stay that way, and the world risks missing out on something of incredible potential (note: yes, I know Android is Linux, but that’s not the perception people have in their minds. It’s just Android, and that’s all that matters).